The Alamance-Burlington Board of Education is starting the long process of creating the school system’s first-ever strategic plan.

The board will talk about it during a Monday afternoon work session at Ray Street Academy.

Many school systems have strategic plans to achieve education goals over time.

School accreditation agencies, including AdvancEd, which accredits Alamance-Burlington schools, encourage, if not require, districts to make those plans.

It has also been one of Superintendent Lillie Cox’s goals and strongly supported by the board.

Board chairman Tony Rose said even the computer system eBOARD, which boards of education in North Carolina use for websites and meeting agendas, has a component to track strategic plans.

Cox said this would take the system from its recently released vision plan to “measurable outcomes.”

The vision plan focused on, among other things, getting students ready for success after high school, attracting qualified teachers and raising community support.

Cox said she hired consultants Melody Clodfelter and Dawn Wooten of MCO Leadership Associates of High Point who, Cox said, have worked with many school systems on strategic plans.

Jenny Faulkner, ABSS spokeswoman, said the district expected the strategic planning process to cost at about $45,000. At least $20,000 for the project had already been secured in donations and the district expected to pay for about half the total cost.

Faulkner said she did not know who the donors were.

The process, Cox said, would include setting goals and writing a goals statement in the next couple of months, assessing the system’s needs, writing a draft plan near the beginning of 2014 and presenting the draft plan to the board in late winter or early spring.

Cox said the system would get a lot of input from people within the system and bring information back to get the board’s input several times between now and May.

Board member Steve Van Pelt said this would be different from the vision plan, which involved a lot of public input.

Van Pelt said this would be more of a guide for people inside the school system to put the public’s ideas into practice, and would only work if there was “buy-in” from people inside the system.

But board vice chair Patsy Simpson said she had expected the board to have more of a role in creating the strategic plan than it had the vision plan.

“The process is not allowing that,” Simpson said, “and I just don’t like that.”

Simpson said she would rather shape the plan at the beginning than end up rejecting the work others were doing.

“I believe you will have more input than you think,” Cox said. “But there will be many people involved.”